


After Rain

by dirty_diana



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 09:23:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14281878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirty_diana/pseuds/dirty_diana
Summary: An alien lands on Earth, and learns something new.





	After Rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eightbots](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eightbots/gifts).



> A little idea based on Avasarala's mention of needing to get Bobbie away from the Martian representatives. Set just after 2x13 and certain to be jossed by the time anyone reads it, but please enjoy anyway. Thanks to anoyo for the beta.

After the first go-round with the turbulence in the atmospheric landing training module, three quarters of Bobbie's training unit passed out. The instructor raised her voice without waiting for any of her charges to find their footing. They were all fresh draftees, baby-faced, lips tinted green from the nausea. In those first days of basic training, some of the kids cried open, salty tears. 

"How will you defeat the Earthers," the instructor demanded, "if you can't even defeat their atmosphere? Are you weak? Or are you Martians?"

Bobbie kept her composure as well as she could. She stood to attention, looking at no particular fixed point ahead. The war hadn't come during her father's service. But it would be here soon. She would be ready.

*

Six years later, when Bobbie's shuttle broke through Earth's ozone, she knit her fingers together and thought to herself: I am Martian.

*

Under the dome or in the suit, Bobbie was a fast runner. For years she'd held most of her unit's training records, daring all the kids that came after her to beat them. The neutral zone that bordered the Martian compound couldn't have been more than fifty yards, but it had felt interminable. Bobbie raised her hands, stared down the barrel of the Blues' guns, felt her head spinning and lungs screaming from the short run, unused to the sharp burn of Earth's oxygen, and thought: this is how I die.

*

When she and Cotyar and Avasarala returned to Earth, Bobbie felt as if she'd been traveling through atmosphere for years. It was far more disorienting to realise that the spy and the old lady trusted her. Far more than they should, so soon. Perhaps it was an Earther thing.

"What's an Earth thing?" Cotyar asked, and Bobbie blinked, surprised to find that she'd spoken out loud. 

She disembarked onto the shuttle tarmac, searching for an acceptable answer. "Tea. I counted seventeen kinds of tea in that galley. Aren't Earthers supposed to sit around doing nothing but drinking coffee all day?"

He rolled his eyes, amused. "We're saving it up for when Mars invades to take it all." Cotyar grabbed his bag, then almost doubled over in pain. Avasarala stood at his left side, eyeing the place where he'd been shot and stitched up with Bobbie's rudimentary battlefield medicine and looking like nothing so much as a worried mother.

"Don't," he said to Avasarala.

The old lady shrugged gracefully, the folds and drapes of her sari glinting under the sun that baked the tarmac. Somehow she still looked as if she were going to a party, rather than escaping a firefight. Avasarala stepped back. "I wasn't doing anything. Or saying anything. You are being stubborn."

"You'd know all about that," was all Cotyar said.

*

It turned out that the Martian delegation had left while they were off-planet. Only a skeleton crew had remained in place. Cotyar delivered this report standing in the centre of Avasarala's living room, wearing his standard stony expression.

Avasarala leaned forward in her armchair, pointing a bony finger at him. "You are supposed to be on medical leave." 

Cotyar's eyebrows rose as he faced her gaze. "How can I have medical leave, Chrisjen? I'm not even technically on the books at the moment. Besides," he added as she drew breath to respond, "I thought that you'd want to know. They appear to have given up on retrieving your guest, for now."

Bobbie snorted, and suddenly two pairs of cynical eyes swung to focus on her.

"Please," Cotyar said, "share your intel."

"They haven't given up," Bobbie answered simply. "They may have had to retreat. But they're not going to concede this as a loss. Not yet. Not to Earth."

"And you know this, because?" Avasarala prompted.

"I know how Martians think." She shrugged.

Cotyar sighed, fingering his belt, where the ghost of a holster might sit. "Great."

*

It was a three-man strike team. They'd timed their operation for the darkest part of the night. Nobody could later remember seeing them on the road, and Cotyar thought they'd probably shuttled into the other side of the ravine bordering Avasarala's house and hiked the rest of the way. 

Avasarala's security team took down two men just after they breached the back porch, and the sound roused Bobbie from her sleep. She grabbed the steak knife she'd pocketed days ago from Avasarala's kitchen, and aimed it just above the rib cage the first armed figure she spotted moving in the darkened house.

He dropped like a sack of rocks. When Avasarala summoned the lights, the unconscious, bleeding intruder was dressed in head to toe black, with no trace of the Martian insignia anywhere. The weapon he'd been gripping, though, was unmistakably the favourite issue for MCRN Special Operations.

"Told you," Bobbie said, kicking the gun away with her bare toes.

*

"That settles it." Avasarala paced the stone floor in her kitchen, sipping a hastily-made cup of tea. "We need to get Bobbie out of the city. I've got a summer place. It's not listed under my name anywhere, no one can find it unless they've been invited. And you'll go with her, Cotyar. To keep an eye on her."

"Who's going to look after you?" he asked.

The old lady scowled at him. "I have been looking after myself since well before you were fucking born."

"Excuse me." Bobbie raised her hand. She'd been given her own cup of tea, but it tasted dank, like the water on board the Martian fleet ships when the purifiers were failing. She left it untouched on the counter top "I can also look after myself."

"Of course you can, dear." Avasarala managed to sound sincere and condescending all at the same time. "But you're not just you now, are you?"

Bobbie squinted. "Right. Who am I then?"

Cotyar shook his head, looking tired. He'd driven out to Avasarala's house in the middle of the night, even though the danger was gone. "It's what you represent. You're the first Martian ever to defect, Draper. But maybe you're not the last. Or maybe the Martians get you, right here on UN soil." He made a chopping motion with one hand.

"And it gets out that no matter what, you're better off sticking with Mars," Avasarala finished. "Because Earth can't protect you."

Bobbie shifted, burying cold fingers in the pockets of the sweatshirt she'd been sleeping in. "Doesn't matter. No one on Mars is ever going to hear about this. About me." Killed in action, her file would say, just as if she'd died in the dirt on Ganymede with the rest of her team. 

"You'd be surprised," Avasarala said, shrugging casually, "what people find a way to talk about."

*

The old lady was rich. Bobbie had known it intellectually, that she must be wealthy, set apart from the Earthers living at the base of the city. But it was a different thing to be standing on the evidence, gazing through the sunny day at Avasarala's rolling green property, the edges of which couldn't be properly seen from the house.

This part of Earth was called Vermont, Cotyar had informed her. Bobbie hadn't ever thought she'd see so much grass in one place. In real life, rather than mimicked on the terraforming sims. Bobbie moved through wide sliding doors that led to a terrace behind the house, then moved quickly backwards in alarm.

"What the fuck is that?"

Cotyar chuckled. "It's a pool, Draper."

"I can see that," Bobbie answered, shoulders raising defensively. The oblong structure was filled with water, shining a bright, translucent blue in the morning sunlight. "But. What's it for?"

"It's for swimming in," Cotyar answered, then made a motion with both his hands when she threw him a puzzled look. He mimed parting the air in front of him, like someone trying to move through a ship in zero-g conditions. "Splash, splash."

"You keep that much water sitting around for playing in?" Bobbie demanded. "Like children. Seriously?"

"Oh, man. We have got to get you on an Earth education program."

Bobbie's idle hands twisted together behind her back. She didn't like being laughed at. "Where's the old lady?" she asked, changing the subject.

"None of your business," Cotyar replied, mechanically.

Bobbie made a face, wrinkling her nose. She stared, until Cotyar relented.

"She's got some business to take care of. If she's going to keep her head off the executioner's block, then she's going to have to figure out who her friends are."

Bobbie gazed into the pool as she considered his answer. "You don't really still cut people's heads off here, do you?" On Mars, she thought, there would at least be the mercy of a firing squad. 

"Who the fuck knows? No one's been executed for treason on Earth in a couple of hundred years." Cotyar shrugged, a hint of worry denting his usual mask of nonchalance for a brief second. "Guess we're going to find out."

*

Bobbie had been given a room on the upstairs floor of the house, and Avasarala's unseen hand was still present. The bed was large and soft, nothing like any military bunk, striped in light from the open window. There was a personal coffeemaker sitting on the dresser, next to a package giving off the scent of fresh beans, and Bobbie smiled. Inside the dresser sat an assortment of summer clothing in exactly her size. Bobbie skimmed through the pile, setting aside the items she couldn't identify, then looked around the room. She found herself drawn back towards the window, staring at the ribbons of clouds that danced on the horizon.

*

Bobbie had been posted to an older Navy ship in a repair dock in Mars once, where nothing ever really happened, just an endless string of routine patrols. Despite its beauty, Vermont turned out to be just as mind-numbingly boring. Bobbie watched movies on the tablet she'd been given, puzzling through the unfamiliar settings and accents.The villains almost always seemed to be Martian, sporting inexplicable costumes and even worse tactical plans. When she'd gone through the most interesting, she took to running in the mornings and evenings, getting as close as she could to the perimeter of the property before Cotyar would begin to scold her.

On the fifth day, Cotyar came up with a fresh distraction. 

"Put on your bathing suit, Draper. We're going to learn to swim."

Bobbie hesitated. There were multiple parts of the order that she didn't understand.

"In the pool," Cotyar explained. "Splash, splash?"

"That isn't necessary," Bobbie said, trying her best not to sound openly horrified at the idea. "When am I going to need to know how to -- do that?"

"You're going to be a citizen of Earth," he reminded her, his eyebrows tilting in equal parts amusement and challenge. "Seventy-five percent of Earth's surface is covered in water. No reason not to know. Unless you're afraid, Marine."

"I'm not," Bobbie insisted, reflexively.

"Good. Then go get dressed."

*

Twenty minutes later Bobbie stood on the edge of the pool, looking at her mutated reflection in the water's surface. She was wearing the one-piece garment she'd located in the bedroom dresser, her black hair tied up in a loose bun.

Cotyar was already standing in the water, wearing a pair of long shorts. His still-healing wound was covered by a waterproof dressing. There were more marks on his shoulders and arms, unmistakably old battle scars. Bobbie glanced away. 

She climbed gingerly down the steps of the pool, wincing at the strange sensation of the cool water surging around her body.

"The first rule is," Cotyar informed her, "don't panic. The human body is designed to float."

"I never panic," she interjected, but Cotyar was frowning.

"Well, our bodies on Earth are, anyway. I'm not one hundred percent certain about Martians."

"You're a terrible instructor," Bobbie said, snapping at him to distract herself as she tiptoed gingerly towards him. The water made waves around her thighs as she moved, and she eyed it suspiciously.

"That might be true." His tone was unexpectedly grim. He watched her inch forward, waving a hand impatiently. "But I'm not going to let you drown, Draper. Take a deep breath."

He placed one hand on her shoulder, against the crook of her neck, and Bobbie steeled herself against making an instinctive countermove.

"I don't--"

"Deep breath," Cotyar repeated, and then he tipped her backwards before she could react. 

_Don't panic._

Suddenly there was water all around her, stinging her eyes and her nose. She flailed for a second, then felt Cotyar's hand at her back, and then suddenly her limbs were loose and light, and she was floating. She blinked away the water, staring up at a blurry blue sky.

Bobbie popped up above the water, with the cutting smell of chlorine filling her senses, and thought: this is how I live.

*

The tablet was buzzing right where she'd left it next to her towel. Bobbie leaned over it, her hair dripping water and Avasarala's face popped onto the screen. She took in Bobbie's soaking wet appearance, and her eyes widened in horror.

"Ms. Draper. Are you quite alright?" 

"I'm fine." Bobbie couldn't help grinning, flying on the sensation of having done something new. "I'm learning to swim."

"Well, you'll need to tidy up. We're needed elsewhere, ASAP." Avasarala gestured upwards, a short movement that encompassed the Moon, Mars, and the Belt.

"Where are we going?" Cotyar asked, and Avasarala's gaze shifted to where he stood, just behind Bobbie's position.

"To rendezvous with some friends. They're a little shy. I don't have the coordinates just yet." The old woman's answer was cryptic.

Cotyar heaved a weighted, expressive sigh, and Avasarala shifted in the frame of the image. 

"Don't worry. I'm not leading us into a trap."

"That," Cotyar reminded her, "is what you said about the last trap."

Avasarala opened her mouth to answer, but Bobbie didn't hear the rest of their argument, distracted by something moving on the edges of her field of sight. She glanced up in time to see a bird flying through the sky. Bobbie stared, transfixed, as it winged lazy loops above them, diving once before it rose, soared, and disappeared.


End file.
